Business Administration/Entrepreneurship

According to the U.S. Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy (September 2009), the estimated 29.6 million small businesses in the United States:

Employ just over half of the country’s private sector workforce

Hire 40 percent of high tech workers, such as scientists, engineers and computer workers

Include 52 percent home-based businesses and two percent franchises

Represent 97.3 percent of all the exporters of goods

Represent 99.7 percent of all employer firms

Generate a majority of the innovations that come from United States companies

Our Program

The Entrepreneurship Certificate is a one- or two-semester program that prepares students for a new employment perspective. The certificate is offered to help students become entrepreneurial thinkers in order to start their own entrepreneurial ventures, to work on management teams of entrepreneurial ventures, or to apply their entrepreneurial abilities to an existing business.

The program has three phases that include the Department of Management and Business Technologies, the Sandhills Small Business Center, and business leaders of the Sandhills, in which traditional tools of curriculum courses, workshops, mentoring program, small business competition, business incubator, angel network, and alumni network are set. While the first phase focuses on completion of the Entrepreneurship Certificate, the second and third phases of entrepreneurial training involve the creation and growth of an entrepreneurial network where alumni of the certificate program and members of the business community can network. Students can participate in all three phases simultaneously.